Innovation Stories From Around The Globe

It’s not everyday that you hear about hackers working to revolutionize the chemical instrumentation industry at a local hackathon. But the winners of our AH8 Cincinnati hackathon aren’t your typical hackers. When I spoke to them, we were still waiting on CEO Olivier Lemaitre. “It’s pretty nice, we all live in the same apartment complex so he’s just walking over to my place,” CTO Andrew Carl told me. It quickly became clear that in the case of AtumSoft, the team that stays together hacks together and accelerates together. See what I did there ;)

AtumSoft consists of a team of four passionate friends with diverse backgrounds that have allowed them to bring their project to life. CEO Olivier Lemaitre is a professional chemist in at Q Laboratories. CTO Andrew Carl works by day as a computer programmer, and has a chemistry degree to match Olivier’s. The team is rounded out by Brad Conyers as COO and Fontana Ruark as Art Director. And for all the romantics out there, Andrew and Fontana are currently engaged. Who said that hackathons can’t be romantic?

What Is AtumSoft?

AtumSoft is a thin-client system solving a problem annoying labs all over the world: the inefficiency of modern-day chemistry equipment: “I spend a lot of my day at work walking around making sure all the equipment’s working, when these days, everything can be connected. I figured there could be a way to change this, and knowing my friends, we knew that we could solve these problems… We realized that pretty much every industry in the world has similar issues, of wasting time and money checking things that don’t need to physically be checked all the time.” - Olivier Lemaitre, CEO of AtumSoft.

The AngelHack Cincinnati champions are currently focused on their ghost MVP. Chemical instruments are pretty expensive, so the team is using Arduinos as mock instruments to gather raw data, and these are hooked into Raspberry Pi’s which stream the data to a central Flask server that does all the interpretation. Boom! Now any local computer can then access the cool graphs AtumSoft produces.

The team of four has been working with the amazing Brian Powell, John Lauck, and Shashank Saxena to bring AtumSoft to life. As of now, the product will be targeting startups in the chemical field. However, these guys (and gal) are clearly unstoppable: they’re working to see AtumSoft become the industry standard for what all chemical instruments are run on. And we can see that happening, they're that good!

“From our experiences, we’ve realized we’ve all grown around business people. The big thing that the HACKcelerator is bringing us is exposure and a timeline… we all have full time jobs so this forces us to work outside of our jobs. And the courses and mentors have really helped us filter our ideas into something that’s actually realizable… if we got to go to San Francisco that would be incredible.” - Olivier Lemaitre.

Olivier and the team see a bright future for AtumSoft, where the system can be applicable in pretty much any industry worldwide. They see an opportunity in the chemical instrumentation field with its current focus on evolving to higher quality analysis. But all the time spent on research doesn’t seem to be improving the actual use of the instruments, which is where the team sees AtumSoft becoming relevant. With little to no competition existing in the market, AtumSoft is really in the perfect position to shake things up in an industry that has seen it coming.

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